


Inside the Lie

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Awkward Crush, Awkwardness, Crushes, F/M, Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 15:18:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15099482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: “This is the end. She’s going to die, right here and now, and it’s nothing like she’d ever pictured.”





	Inside the Lie

**Author's Note:**

> Set just after “When the Bough Breaks” (2 x 05). Thing-a-Month for June. There are spoilers for _Heat Wave_ in here.

 

 

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

— Stephen King

* * *

 

This is the end. She’s going to die, right here and now, and it’s nothing like she’d ever pictured.

A bullet. A high-speed chase. A tweaked out junkie with a rusty paper clip and her own starring role in an especially vivid set of hallucinations. They’re all regulars on her Top-10-ways-Kate-Beckett-Might-Die list when she’s gone all the exhausting way through and come out, sleepless, on the other side.

Saturday brunch with her dad has never made the Top 10, but here she is, at the end of it all.

“Katie!”

He notices her, finally. That’s on her, the _finally_ of it. She’s all the way across the restaurant. She still has her hand on the heavy glass door, as if she might run. She very well might have run until one-one-hundredth of a second ago, when the bell overhead finished its clumsy, jangling chime, and he noticed her, finally.

But she can’t run now. It’s too late. He brightens,  in his quiet, self-contained way. He always does, whether it’s been a week or a month or a string of months between their irregular dates, he brightens. 

Today, there’s a difference, though.Today, he plucks the reading glasses from the end of his nose. He folds them deliberately. With satisfaction, and places them square in the center of The End of Her—a hardbound copy of _Heat Wave_.

“Dad! You’re . . .early.” She crosses the scuffed diner tile to the table in steps that feel stilted. Jerky. Eternal, even though she’s managed to close the gap between them before he’s had time to do more than rise and open his arms. “Earlier than _me.”_

It’s a stupid thing for her to say. _Earlier than me._

“Earlier than you,” he scoffs as he enfolds her in a hug that’s one, two, three seconds longer than usual. It’s his version of teasing. He scoffs, then holds her longer—closer—than is comfortable for either of them.

He’s always earlier than her. He always has been, ever since the rawness between them had subsided enough for this to even happen, these irregular dates. He’s always waiting, and she always wonders, in the back of her mind, if half of him thinks she might not show. If half of him _still_ thinks she just might not.

“Thanks for making time,” he says, as they slide into their respective sides of the booth. It’s another _always._ “I know you’re busy.”

“Pretty busy,” she echoes.

She latches on to it, the reliable bit of dialogue from him. She grabs hold and chatters on about the case. She barely pauses to order. She hardly dares, and she knows it’s weird the way she’s tinking out a rhythm against the wall of her coffee cup as she stirs in the cream. The way she’s chattering at top speed about Eliska Sokol and the Talbots and everything.

About almost everything. She comes to a sudden halt, appalled to find she’s lost her place entirely. She has no idea where she’s been in the story or what comes next.

Her eyes fall on the book again. They fall on his name— _Castle_ —weirdly distorted though the wrong side of the cheap, drugstore readers sitting on the cover. 

“How was it?” her dad asks, stepping into the silence with a carefully, not-quite-concealed smile. “The book party?”

Castle and his damned party. That’s where she stalled out. That’s what’s pulled her up short, and it really is the end now. This is really how she dies. 

“How . . . how did you know there was a party?”

She thinks about the dress she couldn’t afford. The jewelry and the time she wasted trying to wrestle her stupid, in-between-length hair into some presentable style. She thinks about the dedication and their fight. She thinks about him leaving and not leaving. She thinks about too much for god knows how long, and her dad is just sitting there.

Her _dad_ who knows about the party for some reason.

She feels the color leave her cheeks, the blood draining swiftly enough that she practically hears it rushing down through her ears.Her heart stutters in her chest as things go from bad to worse in her head. As she suddenly thinks about newspapers. About page six and gossip columns. She envisions every nosy relative she has and her dad’s phone ringing off the hook.

“I got an invitation.” He rests a hand on the cover. “Along with this.”

“An invitation,” she repeats blankly. That’s worse. That’s somehow _so much_ worse than page six or Aunt Teresa or even paparazzi on his lawn. It’s so much worse than just the heart-stopping realizing that he has the book—that he’s _reading_ the damned book—that she’d give anything to rewind ten minutes and just _run._ “He sent you an invitation?”

“It was”—he runs a finger down the spine, then pushes the book away from him, right into the pony wall separating their booth from the obviously hungover pair on the other side—“kind of him, I thought.”

He means the opposite. The minute pause. The gesture, forceful for him, means the opposite of _kind._

“You don’t like it.” 

It pops out. Statement. Accusation. Objection. Whatever it is, it pops out, and she hardly knows what to make of it. She hardly knows if she’s offended, relieved, surprised, perplexed, scandalized. She hardly knows.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

He takes a long, deliberate sip of his coffee. He’s sizing her up. He’s treating her like an opposition witness, and she’s abruptly 15 again. She’s abruptly one second away from planting her hands on the table’s chipped surface and walkingout in a huff.

She’s one second away, but their waitress arrives with their plates stacked all along her arm, wrist to elbow, and the tension shatters. It’s stupid. She realizes the whole thing is just so _stupid,_ and she can’t think of a thing to do other than dig into her hash browns. To down her coffee and crunch away on the perfectly done bacon and. . . do this. Live through this _stupid_ strange conversation, whatever it’s going to be.

“I see what she saw in them,” he says eventually.

Kate’s head snaps up. She freezes with her fork halfway to her mouth. Wherever she thought he might pick up the thread of it, wherever she dreamed the conversation might go, it wasn’t here. “Mom?”

He nods down at his eggs. He smiles to himself, and it’s real. That simple smile is so much more _real_ than the sadness-tinged muscle memory she’s used to seeing, even when his gaze first lands on her. Even when he brightens, every time. 

“I teased her, you know.” He looks up, then. He meets her gaze, a little shame-faced as he purses his lips. As he winds up to strange imitation of himself. “ ‘Johanna Beckett, I just do _not see_ how could a woman like you’—“

“An _intelligent_ woman,” Kate cuts in. She smiles hard at the memory of her mother’s eyes narrowing. Of her hands landing squarely on her hips and the sharp slice of her reply. She’d throw Clancy back at him. Follett and Ludlum and latter-day LeCarré, and they’d both wind up laughing. They’d wind up tossing sharp, playful insults at each other for a long while afterward.

He smiles, too. He smiles hard, and suddenly it’s just a conversation. Suddenly they’re over some hill neither of them knew was there, and it’s like they talk about her all the time. Like her name isn’t something they dole out at long intervals in case the well of it—the well of all she meant to each of them, to both of them—might run dry.

“I teased her, but I see it now.” He smiles. He picks up his fork again and goes on between bites. “Good pacing. The characters. It’s well done.”

“Well done,” she grumbles. She shoves a piece of toast in her own mouth to buy time. To figure out if she agrees or not.

“ _You_ don’t like it?”

He cocks an eyebrow, not asking _her_ so much as he seems to be asking himself what to make if it. What to _do_ about it, and that has her rushing in. It has her scrambling to make some kind of sense of it.

  
“It’s just . . . it’s all so . . . big.” She pokes ferociously at her eggs, annoyed beyond all measure at the sudden poverty of her own vocabulary. “Everything— _everything_ about it’s just . . .overblown.”

“Well, I’m relieved to hear it.” He means it. He arranges a wry smile on his face to make light of it, but he means it. “That attack in the apartment . . .”

She chokes. Damned near chokes, anyway, on the swallow of coffee she hasn’t quite finished as the word NAKED flashes like an electronic billboard through her mind. The attack in her apartment where she was NAKED. _Nikki was naked,_ she reminds herself, pointedly _not_ looking at the stupid cover art. Pointedly not thinking about page 105.

Nikki was naked, and she is definitely not Nikki. She breathes through her nose. She concentrates and swallows and looks up just in time to see it. The sly smile he couldn’t quite hide every time he’dteased her mother.

She _just_ sees it, and it saves her. It saves them both.

“Totally overblown, Dad,” she says casually. She actually managescasual as her hand snakes out to steal a perfectly crisp piece of bacon from his plate. “I don’t even _own_ an iron.”

**Author's Note:**

> Posting today, rather than the last day of the month, because I finished it today and I have the feeling I'll hate it too much tomorrow.


End file.
